One German city developed – and then lost – generations of math geniuses

Sadly, this article does not answer the question of why such a concentration of brilliance developed at Göttingen. If we wanted to build a new Göttingen, how would we do it? What factors allowed Göttingen to exist? For most of a century, Germany was leading in most scientific and academic fields, but what allowed this? When we think of the Golden Age of physics we are thinking of a cultural event that had its center in Germany, but why? And why has Germany been so dull and flat ever since? Clearly, building a liberal democracy is not enough to ensure such a cultural event. Much of Germany was liberal but non-democratic during its golden age, as other places were, but what made Germany special at this time?

“The center of mathematics shifted quickly during the Nazi era and in the wake of World War II. Courant, Weyl and others helped move it to the U.K. and the U.S., where most of the top-ranked mathematics programs are located today.”

One of many instances in history where a city’s rise to prominence was kicked off by political turmoil or religious persecution in the leading city of the previous era. For example: immigration of merchants and weavers from Belgium to the Netherlands following Spanish occupation and the Fall of Antwerp, Huguenot emigration from France during the French Wars of Religion, etc.

When trying to answer the question of why a certain city/country/company started becoming successful, it’s often a good starting point to ask who moved there and what skills and experience did they bring, rather than mistaking it as a static group of individuals.

Another corollary: it really pays to be a tolerant, stable and welcoming country. When other countries do stupid things you can benefit from an inflow of talent and experience.

It's not just mathematics but physics as well.

For example Paul Dirac, Max Born, Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Heisenberg, John von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Max Planck, and Wolfgang Pauli either studied, did research or had a profession in Göttingen

One interesting annecdote: combinatory logic uses single letter names for all its combinators (S, K, I, etc). Those names are all in german, despite being invented by a Russian jew (Moses Shoenfinkel) and further developed by an american (Haskell Curry). Both worked at Göttingen at the time.

It's a bit amusing that the article stops with the 1930s exodus and entirely ignores the 1940s exodus to the USA organized by US intelligence agencies under Operation Paperclip. It's true not many of this latter group were involved in pure mathematics, I suppose:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

It’s amazing how much America has benefited from brain drain from totalitarian countries. We should keep it up.

Constance Reid's wonderful biography "Hilbert" [New York: Springer-Verlay, 1983; ISBN: 0-387-04999-1] describes a lot of the history of mathematics in Göttingen. It may be the finest mathematical biography I've ever read.

Hermann Weyl wrote an article on Hilbert's mathematical work (from the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society [pdf]):

https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1944-50-09/S0002-9904-1944...

Hilbert's mathematical range was enormous. Among many things, he was known for his 23 "Hilbert problems" which influenced a lot of subsequent mathematics:

Benjamin Yandell, "The Honors Class - Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers". Natick, MA: A. K. Peters, 2002. [ISBN:1-56881-141-1]

There's been significant progress on some of the problems since Yandell's book, but it's still a good introduction.

I worked with an older German man who was a consultant on a research project that I was working on in graduate school. He was born in Gottingen and told stories how as a kid he got to test his paper airplanes in their wind tunnels with these famous scientists.

Göttingen became a center of math clearly because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss, the Princeps mathematicorum. His influence was crucial for the development of math and science in Germany of the 19th century.

'Want more, get more' (related Comic it's in german... but ...who may know for what's good... I'm a non native english speaker...)

https://shorturl.at/guck2

regards...

Having graduated from a Polish university and having done a semester in Germany I can say that at least the people who attended university in Germany had an idea what are they interested in and what do they want to do after graduating, while me and all my peers in Poland just went to college because of societal pressure and kept jumping the hurdles put up by academic staff who knew no better and were taught that academia is just about about bootlicking your way up while pretending to teach.

I suppose a similar argument could be made about Bell Labs, where much of the digital foundations were invented.

The political changes that lead to the talent exodus from Goettingen are not, in fact, so different from the ideological oaths required by much of US academia now, and seem to me to be a great way to eliminate our centers of intellectual brilliance.

>Bernhard Riemann, the head of mathematics at Göttingen from 1859 to 1866, invented Riemannian geometry, which paved the way for Einstein’s future work on relativity. Felix Klein, the chair of mathematics from 1886 to 1913, was the first to describe the Klein bottle,...

...paving the way for Cliff Stoll!

Americans typically don’t realize how lucky they were that World War II caused so much chaos in Europe and many of the best minds flooded to the US to kickstart the technology revolution and seed the economic powerhouse that it is today.

I wonder how Nazi-Germany would have worked out without antisemitism.